Are Spam Blockers Too Strict?

Myrte writes "Wired.com has a long piece on whether spam blockers are blocking wanted messages." From the article: "For years, e-mail users complained that torrents of unwanted messages clogged their inboxes and crimped their productivity. Now, e-mail users, marketers and mailing list operators are more worried that spam filters are blocking out too many wanted messages. AOL isn't the only company to face charges that it improperly blocks legitimate messages. But, as the world's largest ISP for years, it has long borne the brunt of complaints from mass e-mailers over the problem."

Comments

Spam blockers ruined my life.

[Rob T Firefly]

Thanks to my damn spam blocker, I've missed out on hundreds of opportunities to accept millions of dollars from Nigerian royalty.

Re:Spam blockers ruined my life.

[c0d3h4x0r]

You think that's bad? Thanks to spam blockers, my dick is only one inch long.

Norton Antispam

[devphaeton]

The absolute biggest piece of hilarity is Norton Antispam. People rush out and buy it, and install it on their computers. Usually they never do anything in the way of setting it up (just expect it to work magically), but that makes no difference because it continually reconfigures itself on its own whims.

And then they call and abuse their ISP support personnel for days on end of "I'm not getting any of my damned email!!"

And it's all right there in their 'Deleted Items' folder. :rolleyes:

I don't understand

[linvir]

it has long borne the brunt of complaints from mass e-mailers over the problem

Does this mean mailing list owners or something? I associate "mass e-mailer" with "spammer", so my first instinct was "You may continue to cry". So are there other mass e-mailers? Does it mean the likes of Amazon? If so they too may continue to cry. I don't need to know about This week's hot deals on Electronics & Photo at Amazon.co.uk.

I'd like it if my spam filter could "mod up"...

[VMaN]

I'd like it if my spam filter could "mod up" non english email.

most of my email correspondance isn't in english, while most of my spam is in english... I've instructed my dad to delete ANY mail with an english subject if he doesn't know the sender before opening it, and that seems to work out fine, english is his 3rd/4th language and only has 2 contacts using it. If something is important enough, he'll get at call about it :) (this probably wouldn't fly at work, but for his personal email it's fine)

It's not that they're too strict

[Nijika]

It's more that SMTP is too broken. The model we use to communicate with each other is sadly too open, given the potential of the technology for automation. The real solution is to extend or replace SMTP completely.

Re:It's not that they're too strict

[hackstraw]

The real solution is to extend or replace SMTP completely.

People say this from time to time, but they conclude that its still best the way it is. I value mailing lists, and making people pay or whatever proposed mechanism there is simply does not cut it.

I get spam sent via email. I get spam in my snail mailbox. I get spam on my fax machine. I get spammed by cold calls from sales drones/marketers. I've never had this happen (yet), but I've seen someone's phone get spammed with hundreds of porn text messages over a 10 or 15 minute time period. The user was initially billed for the porn spams and had to call the phone company to get them taken off of there bill.

It just seems as though open communication is just going to be subject to spam. Don't want it? Use your own private network to communicate.

How is this a "gray area"

[TubeSteak]

A particularly troublesome gray area, Schneider said, involves affiliate marketers. These marketers often send e-mails to people who signed up on a website with whom the affiliate has a marketing agreement. The recipient of the e-mail, however, probably isn't aware of the arrangement and has no idea why they're receiving the message.

Translation: people are getting e-mails they neither want, nor expected.

It's like inviting someone to a party & you agree that they can bring their "affiliates" along. Your invitee shows up with 20 strangers & whoever you have working the door says "I don't know all these people, they aren't allowed in."

The solution isn't to cry about the "gray" area, it's to explicitly tell people who the fark these affiliates are & what they'll be sending.

Confirmation challenge

[Spazmania]

When I get a message with a moderate probability of being spam, my spam blocker sends a message back requesting that the sender confirm the message. Works great. Those few legitimate senders stuck on a problematic server can still get their messages to me and so far no spammer has attempted to bypass it.

The only time it doesn't work is when the sender's spam blocker dumps the confirmation request or when the sender doesn't understand what to do.

Don't send mass e-mails

[iamacat]

Just like door to door salesmen and tele-marketers, mass e-mailers have ruined their reputation as a group and are no longer effective at what they are trying to do. If you want to keep your customers updated, offer an RSS feed, personalized with their user id if necessary. Times change, deal with it.

Yes and no

[Bogtha]

If a user has signed up for a mailing list, and doesn't get what they asked for, then that's a false positive, no matter how commercial the mailing list. And this does happen. So in that respect, spam blockers are too strict.

But on the other hand, I fish out a few false positives from my spam dump every month and look to see why they were blocked. In most of the cases, it's because the mailing list operator is doing something dumb. For instance, the last false positive I received - for a legitimate, informative mailing list I deliberately signed up for - triggered my spam filter because of forged headers, two counts of malformed headers, and every other line was in all caps.

The reason why they were caught out was because they used what appears to be a mass mailer designed for sleazy purposes, and they didn't bother with any QA.

Anybody who is running a mailing list should follow a few simple rules:

1. If you outsource, outsource to a reputable company.
2. If you run the mailing list yourself, use reputable software.
3. Set up an email account for every popular spam blocker, and include those addresses in your mailing lists. Check those accounts every time you send out an email, to see if you are blocked by any of them.
4. Never buy email addresses. Ever.

That's what I consider to be common sense, but apparently common sense is hard to come by these days.

I've Definitely Had Problems With AOL

[John_Booty]

I used to work for a company that sent emails to medical professionals regarding ongoing clinical drug studies.

These emails absolutely took "opt-in" to the next level.

Not only did the doctors opt-in to receive these emails, they had to go through a fairly rigorous screening process to be eligible to receive them. On top of that, it actually would have been highly illegal for us to send these emails to others!

So, needless to say, the emails weren't spam and were going to modestly-sized email lists of 100-1,000 total recipients, approx 25% of which were AOL users.

And still, we had countless problems with AOL blocking them. AOL never listened nor responded.